family

My friend The Girl in the Glasses posted a Motivational Monday post yesterday (Dear, Future Me) that I thought was SO clever. You can and SHOULD pop over to read her post, but in it she highlights a website called My Little Dream Box. The site is a place you can write your future self a letter and it will hold the letter for exactly 365 days then deliver it to your email inbox. How clever!

We’re watching over your dreams – to give you the desire to make them come true, send yourself an email that you will receive in the future. In 365 days precisely, and not a day more, a message will be waiting for you in your inbox, to help you confront your personal challenges.
Follow your dreams.

Personally, I’ll be writing myself a few letters this year, I think. The one I just wrote pointed out things that I want to try to do over the next year, and asked my future self if I have achieved them. I also wrote a couple of things that are current milestones for the kids so that I can look back and remember what they were up to. Kids grow so fast, it’s easy to forget things. So this has prompted an interesting set of thoughts in my head. What’s important to you right now? What do you want to achieve in the next year? Where do you want to be in your life? What do you want to make happen? I, as always, would love to hear about it, but if you don’t want to tell me, maybe a letter to yourself would be just thing for you!

Here we are again, week 4 of my Gratitude Journal entries and thankfulness. Also, a quick apology for missing yesterday’s Wordless Installation. I had uploading issues.

Anyway, here we go.

Monday 4/13: Family cuddle time on the couch while geeking out to Star Wars (Episode 6). We started with Episode 4 (as one should) and it BLEW my 7 year old’s mind! This was her first time watching all the movies and I think it’s safe to say that she’s hooked.

Tuesday 4/14: Time to pamper myself a bit and paint my nails.

Wednesday 4/15: Packing up the family to take a little drive, have some dinner, and just spend time together.

Thursday 4/16: Batdad getting an earlier appointment to see the specialist about his sinuses.

Friday 4/17: Having such cool in-laws and random road trips to pick up my father-in-law so he can hang out with us. He works a very early shift in the morning and works 10+ hour days so he’s usually pretty tired in the evening. They live a little more than an hour away from us so we see them pretty frequently but he was too tired to drive after work so we went up to get him.

Saturday 4/18: Lots of family coming to Little Miss’s soccer games. Even though she didn’t feel well she tried hard.

Sunday 4/19: Feeling productive but still getting to relax a little. Going to the park to throw Styrofoam airplanes as a family.

Well, I promised you lovely people a new weekly feature, and here it is! Week One of Thankful Thursdays. It’s easy to get caught up in all the stresses of life and focus so much on correcting the things that are going wrong/amiss that you forget to focus on all the good things are still happening in life. Anyone else guilty of this?

I know I am. I started keeping a gratitude journal. It’s not too intensive, I just reflect on my day or the previous day and write one thing that I’m thankful for. So Thursdays, I’ll be sharing the previous week’s gratitude entries and I’d love for ya’ll to share some things you’re grateful as well! It may take me a couple posts to decide on a format I like for these posts, but I’ll try not to change it up too much.

Here we go!

3/23 Monday: I’m thankful that my little sister likes to spend time with me and my family at my house with my niece and nephew.

3/24 Tuesday: I’m thankful for my home. It may be tiny and cramped, but it’s ours and it’s also cozy and full of love (most of the time, haha)

3/25 Wednesday: As odd as it sounds, I’m thankful for my pudgy belly. It helps my massive toddler get comfortable when I’m holding him, and he loves to lay his head on it when we snuggle on the couch.

3/26 Thursday: I’m thankful for sinus medication, my air conditioner, and a comfy/soft blanket to snuggle under while I feel like crap.

3/27 Friday: Comfortable dresses that I can wear to work. Decorative and functional.

3/28 Saturday: Great deals on furniture and my craft capabilities for reupholstering them.

Before new fabricAfter new fabric

3/29 Sunday: I’m thankful for my sweet niece and nephew. It’s wonderful being able to spend so much time with them, and to have the wisdom to know that me having another child would mean the end of any remaining sanity I’ve managed to retain after two children of my own.

It’s not that bad. I’m very tired today, but I think that’s sort of a Monday-staple. So on Friday afternoon when I got off work, it was just Little Man and I for a little bit. I was on a mission to find new dining room chairs on the cheap since the ones we have currently spin. Spinning chairs+children= potential disaster. So I grabbed Little Man, we went to Dutch Bros where I got a green tea and he got a juice as a little treat, then we went to our local Habitat for Humanity to have a look of what they had. I found two chairs there and Little Man got some popcorn (he LOVES popcorn). I chose not to buy the chairs since I didn’t have the truck with me and I wanted to check some yard sales Saturday to see if I found anything I liked better.

Saturday I got up and decided the yard sale thing was a go since Little Man was in a pretty good mood and the weather was nice, and we could hit up Habitat again if I didn’t find anything. One of my girlfriends came with us, but there wasn’t much in the way of good yard sales happening. My theory is that the weather has been so unpredictable that people are choosing to wait on the yard sale thing. So back to Habitat we went to get the two chairs I had liked despite them being a terrible green color. I also ended up buying a new (to me) dining room table that the chairs (both new and spinning) would fit under a little better. Then I headed to Little Miss’s soccer game which ended up being just a scrimmage due to the other team only having 3 teammates in attendance. It was cute though and all the kids had fun. While cleaning the chairs up after I got home from the game I pulled the seat and back off and realized how easy they were going to be to reupholster so we ran to the fabric store. I spent the rest of the evening cleaning up the kitchen to make room for the new table and reupholstering one of the chairs (it only took about an hour). I waited to do the other until Batdad got home and decided whether or not he liked what I did to the first one.

Sunday I woke up at 5:30am to watch my niece and nephew. My sister had to work at 6 and her boyfriend had plans for his birthday, so being the AWESOME sister I am, I said I would watch them. Now, they’re great kids, but Nephew is 5 and Niece is 6 months old. Combine that with Little Man, who is almost 2, and you have potential chaos. Little Miss was at her Grandma’s house for the weekend as her other dad was in town. Little Man and Niece .60 (ya like what I did there?) both wanted to cry at me at the same time all day, Little Man was being very jealous, he woke Niece .60 up twice while she was sleeping, and just in general it was a lot of extra work. It pretty much solidified in my mind that I’m not having anymore children. I know people that have children close together in age but I’m not one of those people. There is a 5 year age difference between my kids and I’ve never understood wanting to have a toddler and a baby at the same time. So much work. Anyway, after they left I continued with my cleaning and ended up staying up until 2am trying to fold all the laundry I’ve fallen behind on.

It might sound like a boring weekend, but it was full full full. How about all of you lovely people? How was your weekend? Do anything fun, interesting, or monotonous?